Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 16 JULY 2008
DR IAN
HUDSON, MR
ALEX WALSH,
MS FIONA
WARE AND
MR BILL
BRYCE
Q100 Mr Boswell: Their skills are
transferable probably.
Mr Bryce: Many of them are transferable,
yes.
Q101 Chairman: You think these people
already exist.
Mr Bryce: Some of them do. We
need more.
Q102 Chairman: With the greatest
of respect, though, that is not the information that seems to
be coming in terms of the workforce survey studies. Certainly
nuclear engineering, to start with, has an age profile which suggests
that a significant number of people are going to retire in the
next 10 years, and that profile seems to be in every branch of
engineering. Are these people going to take pills and become younger?
Mr Bryce: You are correct, and
that is why I say that in some areas there are shortages. We need
to be taking steps to change that.
Q103 Chairman: Okay. Perhaps I could
turn to you, Fiona. In terms of coming back to the nuclear industry,
obviously it is an exciting time, if we are to believe that all
is going to come to pass, both in terms of civil and in terms
of military capacity. What do you think are the largest challenges
for the UK nuclear industry over the next 20-30 years?
Ms Ware: It will be dealing with
the growth and regenerating an interest in the industry, because
it has been a static industry or an industry in decline. I think
the industry is now responding. Visibility, again, and commitment
to the Government for the sustainability of some of these longer-term
programmes makes it a more exciting industry, and I think that
makes it more attractive to bring more people into the industry.
I do not think that decommissioning is seen as particularly exciting
to a large number of the population; whereas new build is more
exciting, is more attractive to bring people into the industry.
One of our challenges will be to attract people into the industry.
Q104 Chairman: Dr Hudson, there seems
to be a view that, because of a lack of commitment to new nuclear
build over the last 15 or 20 years, we have lost that attractiveness,
that capacity. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the nuclear
industry as you see them at the moment?
Dr Hudson: There are a couple
of strengths. To build on something Fiona said: if you look at
the decommissioning industry, I would say that about five years
ago the interest was not particularly great. When the NDA came
on the scene you could see some things change. For instance, for
the Masters degree in Decommissioning Engineering at Lancaster
the intake has been trebled over the last few years, just because
of the interest alone. If you look at the attractions for the
industry, the first thing is that the industry offers long-term
career opportunities, not just in decommissioning but across a
range of operations—so that is quite important; it is an
international business; and, also, it sits between government
and commercial. It is quite interesting: you can experience commercial
opportunities, commercial innovation, you can work with government,
and you can work with the regulators, so the diversity of challenge
is quite significant. With all the positive press that is associated
with nuclear at the present moment in time, we are seeing a renewed
interest. To some extent, from a decommissioning perspective,
there is this sort of magnifying effect which we can see in some
of our graduate programmes. For our nuclear graduate programme
we had over 1500 people apply, and we had about 10 or 12 places;
in the second tranche we are up to past 700, again for about 10
or 12 places. Just for that particular scheme alone you can see
that interest ratcheting up.
Q105 Chairman: Is it the same for
BAE Systems? Would you echo that?
Mr Walsh: It is not necessarily
the new build which has made the industry unattractive. I went
to university in 1979. That was just after Three Mile Island had
happened. I decided to do a nuclear engineering degree because
I considered it to be the "green" thing to do at the
time. After Three Mile Island there was a big swing in public
opinion.
Q106 Chairman: Slightly, yes.
Mr Walsh: I remember the nuclear
engineers were the pariahs of the college. The number of youngsters
who wanted to go into nuclear engineering fell off. The nuclear
engineering degrees shut down before the end of the new build
with Sizewell B. There was a real public swing which said that
this was not an industry that you would want to get into if you
were a youngster, so I do not blame the stopping of new build
for the youngsters not coming in. I think we have to show that
it is an attractive industry. It is a very green industry. That
is the type of thing which will appeal to the youngsters and start
to attract them into the industry.
Q107 Dr Gibson: I do not have a picture
of how many people you think you might need to do the work that
the Government are giving you. Are we talking about thousands
of people? Hundreds? Somebody must have done the sums, surely.
There must be some strategy, at least, somewhere.
Mr Walsh: In Sizewell B during
the construction, at the peak there were about 3,000, but most
of those were general engineers, civil contractors and the like,
but then you would have the supply chain as well that supports
that, which would probably multiply it out—I do not know,
but I would guess—to 20,000.
Q108 Dr Gibson: Come on, you guys
should know. You are in charge of the whole business, are you
not? Who knows?
Dr Hudson: I can offer a view
from a decommissioning perspective.
Q109 Dr Gibson: A view? I want the
facts.
Dr Hudson: I can give you some
information. On the back of the skill strategy that we have, we
have about 20,000 people across all our site licence companies.
Around 25% of those are engineering graduates and then 48% of
those would be technical. If you map that out over the next 15-20
years, you can see a steady decline to about 2015 from our mission,
then you see quite a marked reduction from 2015, and then you
see another marked reduction from 2020. From an NDA perspective
across those site licence companies, we can map those figures
out, and we can map the technical competencies across that. Those
are facts and those are based on the lifetime plans. Invisible
within those plans are the various scenarios that may come out
of government policy, and the decommissioning of subsequent British
Energy reactors and MoD decommissioning as well. Those are not
in our plans.
Q110 Dr Gibson: Are you recruiting?
Are nuclear engineers being recruited?
Dr Hudson: We are recruiting.
Q111 Dr Gibson: Where are the adverts?
In The Sun, in the Mirror?
Dr Hudson: We are recruiting.
We take about 170 graduates a year. The strategy we have taken
with the nuclear graduate scheme is not to be advertising in places
like the Times or the Telegraph but to work with
the career services in universities and to get the message out
through that. We had an event about two weeks ago, where there
were 170 people from the range of universities across the UK,
and something like 25 or 30 industries from the nuclear footprint
as part of the event. It was starting to build that relationship.
For instance, on the nuclear graduate scheme, the numbers I told
you about were without the advertising in the Telegraph;
they were all about building the relationship with the academics
and the students. It is a different approach.
Q112 Dr Gibson: Are you confident
that you are going to get home-grown students? Are you going to
get your workforce from people from the universities and other
places, or are you having to do like the football teams do and
go abroad to get three-quarters of the team?
Dr Hudson: From the clean-up perspective,
we have attracted enough people from the home-grown talent. You
can see that in the graduate schemes. We do get enough people
like that. We also get the attraction of international people
as well. If you take the recent contract award at Sellafield,
it is only a small number—you are talking about a number
of 20 or so in terms of the senior management team—but through
that contract they bring people who are called enhancers, who
come in for periods of up to two years to work with the local
population, transfer some of those skills, and then go off, leaving
the skills behind[1].
It is always an issue in terms of getting local home-grown talent.
In decommissioning it is different: we do not have the same constraints
as the military perspective. I do not know if any of my colleagues
can offer a view about that, but from a decommissioning perspective
we do okay.
Mr Bryce: I can quantify it a
bit. Excluding the military side, which Alex may be able to enlarge
on, there are currently about 40,000 people in the UK employed
in the nuclear industry directly, and then there are another 80,000
to 100,000 covering the support to the generating stations, clean-up.
There is really not a lot going on in new build at the moment.
As time progresses, the number involved in clean up is going to
reduce, as Ian has indicated, but then the new build programme
is going to start kicking in, we hope. For a new build programme,
excluding those things that the UK cannot supply—for example,
the reactor pressure vessels and the turbo generators will need
to be imported—typically we are talking of probably about
1,000 to 2,000 jobs in the manufacturing industry, we are talking
of about 3,000 jobs on the site construction—these are direct
jobs—and, along with that, probably about 50% more in supporting
them. When we come to the operation, we are talking of probably
300 people full-time, operating a new nuclear station, with about
100 to 200 in support—that is coming from the contractor
support—and then another 1,000 people in the community getting
indirect jobs.
Q113 Dr Gibson: Would you put your
salary on the fact that you are going to get these? Do you think
the educational systems and so on are up for it?
Mr Bryce: No, we are going to
have to compete for many of these jobs.
Q114 Mr Boswell: Internationally?
Mr Bryce: Internationally, yes,
for a lot of the manufacturing work. For the site installation
work, we would expect UK industry ought to be in a preferred position,
because we do not see the nuclear vendors at Westinghouse or Areva
importing large quantities of blue-collared workers. Once again,
we are going to have to compete for the work, and we are going
to have to have these people, and, generally, the industry is
addressing the recruitment. If I could mention my own company
again, we have a very intensive recruitment and training campaign
that is including people from overseas; targeting the Armed Forces
looking for Army, Air Force and Navy veterans; and targeting schools,
getting in at the secondary school level, and all the other members
of the Nuclear Industry Association are doing similar things.
With that sort of effort—and, as I said earlier, it is not
easy, we have to keep pushing it—we should be able to take
a fair share of this work.
Q115 Dr Gibson: Do you think people
from abroad are just more skilled than our people at the minute?
Mr Bryce: No, I do not think so.
We have been importing quite a number of people from Poland and
from Portugal. Their qualifications are not totally interchangeable,
particularly for putting them on to nuclear plant, and we have
had to do additional training and additional certification to
use them on nuclear plants.
Q116 Chairman: In terms of the very
top skills, the sort of PhD-level nuclear scientists and nuclear
engineers that we are going to need on a whole range of different
projects, niche people, where are we going to get those from?
They are not coming from our universities at the moment?
Mr Bryce: Not at the moment, but
I think in a few years time they are going to come.
Q117 Chairman: Dr Gibson's question
is really quite specific. You seem to be saying that there is
a market out there. Like Manchester United or Chelsea or Dundee
United will simply go and get the best players—it is just
an in joke—
Mr Bryce: I hope we are going
to be more successful than Dundee United!
Q118 Chairman: What is industry doing
to make sure that UK plc has these people? Or is it just down
to the university system?
Mr Bryce: No, I think the industry
is importing some of these people. They are working overseas,
because this is an international market.
Chairman: I have got that point, but
what are we doing to get indigenous, UK people?
Q119 Dr Gibson: Are you paying their
PhD studentships for them? Are you paying off their student debts?
Mr Bryce: Are we, as my company?
1 Note from the witness: "The contract
I referred to was not `awarded'- we announced the preferred bidder". Back
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